The Art of

116
01
REINHILD
DETTMER-FINKE
in collaboration with
Matthias Reichelt,
SHOAH and PIN-UPS:
The NO!Artist Boris
Lurie, a documentary,
88 min., Germany,
2006, 00.41-01:10 min.
Boris Lurie took another path. He became neither an empirical chronicler
of the mass extermination, nor did he attempt, as others, to set an example
against trivialization by means of bold actions. In this respect, he cannot
be assessed as a “Holocaust artist,” although his life and artistic work is
shaped by the persecution by the National Socialists‘ death machine.
After a short phase of reminiscing in drawings on his four years in different
concentration camps, he shifted his work to the interpretation of the
collision of the world of survivors of the mass extermination and of a society
that would not become interested in the conditions of survival until decades
after the end of the war. In his search for a form of artistic expression
that would do justice to this “clash of cultures,” he tried and tested various
conventional styles, all of which he then rejected. In the late fifties, he then
established the NO!art movement, as distinct from Abstract Expressionism
and Pop art, along with Stanley Fisher and Sam Goodman, two artist friends
who had served in World War II as soldiers. In a small art gallery in what at
the time was the inexpensive East Village of New York City, the artists’ group
addressed the themes that were on the agenda in the United States after
McCarthyism: repression, puritanism, sexuality, and sexism, but also international
political problems and their impact on an art world that gave outsiders
no chance. Lurie’s art became a weapon against everything that he
perceived as disruptive and unsettling. This included criticism of the crimes
in Europe as well as his experiences in the United States, where media coverage
of the mass murder of European Jews was sandwiched between advertisements
and gossip columns. In his assemblages, he addressed the puritanical
ban on publically presented intimacy in works simultaneously displaying
commercial eroticism and the pictorial transmission of the mass
extermination as a link between sexuality, death, and historical ignorance.
His works met with indignation and rejection by the art market, art critics,
and collectors. This reaction reinforced his refusal to offer his works on an
art market.
Lurie’s use of symbols of the Nazi state and of the mass extermination—
the swastika, the “yellow star”—of excrement, knives, and axes, should never
only be understood as direct references to the Holocaust. They express a
general refusal to come to terms with an imperfect world. Art, in Lurie’s
opinion, has to address contradictions and deficiencies. “I would have loved
to make pretty pictures, but something always prevented me from doing
so,” he states in the documentary film Shoah and Pin-Ups. 01
In a letter to Boris Lurie, the artist Wolf Vostell, who died in 1998, writes of
his supposition that, “every painter would have a difficult time obtaining
recognition with ‘evil,’ enlightening, and dialectical image material...” And
continues: “That’s why you will have a hard time in the United States and will
have a hard time in Berlin... I wish you a fitting place in the new collection
CILLY KUGELMANN